This is a myopic view. Amazon's physical retail has been amazingly profitable for a long time. And when you go into the oldest categories of physical retail (books, electronics, baby, fashion, etc), they were each massively unprofitable for a time until they became massively profitable.
https://hurricanecapital.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/business-i...
>HB: So, let’s just establish this once and for all. Can Amazon make money?
>JB: Well, yes, and in fact we have in the past. And you have to understand, there are many ways of thinking about this, but the reality is that Amazon is a collection of several businesses and initiatives. And we have some very significant, very profitable, more established businesses that are free cash-flow generating. Very significantly. And fortunately, the way I think about it, we have lots of opportunities to invest in this new initiatives, and we take advantage of those opportunities. So, it’s kind of like we built this lemonade stand, you know, twenty years ago. The lemonade stand has become very profitable over time. But we also decided to use our skills and the assets that we’ve acquired over time to open up a hamburger stand, and a hot dog stand, and so on and so on. So we’re investing in new initiatives.
>JB: Look, you know. Warren Buffett has this great quote, he says: “You can hold a rock concert, and that’s okay. And you can hold a ballet, and that’s okay. Just don’t hold a rock concert and advertise it as ballet.” Investors come in all shapes and sizes. They have different investment horizons, different approaches, different beliefs about what the right kind of portfolio looks like. And, so it’s not when you know people use Wall Street as a shorthand. But there isn’t one type of investor, they come in different shapes and sizes. You have to be super clear about what kind of company you’re trying to build, what your approach is. We laid that out in our 1997 annual shareholder letter. We said we were going to take big bets. We said they were gonna fail. We said some of them hopefully were gonna work. We said we were gonna to invest for the long term, that we were gonna to take advantage of market opportunities as they arose. And there’s a certain kind of investor who is aligned with that approach. And so again, you could hold the ballet or the rock concert, and both can work. Just be clear about which one you are, and then people can self select.